EDGAR NOMINATED CRIME WRITER

When Story Goes Wrong: My Amber-Induced Rage

As you may or may not know, I love TV. Good TV that is. I have no time for people who are happy to stick their nose in a book but only look down their nose at television. I love stories and I love writers, and that’s what’s on and who’s behind TV. Yes, there’s bad TV, but there’s bad books too. If your argument is that TV-watching is too passive an activity, turn on your TV’s captioning service. There. Sorted.

A few months ago, the final episode of a four-part drama series called Amber aired here on the state broadcaster’s channel RTE, and as our TV screens faded to black we took to Twitter and raged. Then we called into radio shows and raged. When we next saw our friends and family we said, ‘Were you watching Amber?’ and if the answer was yes then we raged some more.

In the first episode four nights before, a teenage girl — Amber — disappeared. She got her father to drop her to a friend’s house, waited until he’d driven away and then scurried off somewhere. We’d all stayed tuned for more than an hour each evening since to follow the investigation and the search, while flashbacks teased us about Amber’s final (?) hours. What happened to Amber? both we and the characters on the show wondered aloud. Where is she? Where did she go? The acting was mostly great, the production was sleek and the opening titles even had a touch of Top of the Lake about them. Many of us had spent numerous Saturday nights glued to subtitled Scandinavian drama on BBC4 (e.g. The Killing and The Bridge) and sat through Christmas impatient for new Sherlock, so it was a treat to have a slick crime drama of our own to watch featuring An Garda Siochana (the Irish police force) and Irish actors.

Or so we thought.

I can’t write the rest of this without revealing the details of Amber, but since it already aired, most of you don’t live in Ireland and I feel compelled to warn those of you who live in the UK not to waste four nights of your life watching it like we did when it airs on BBC4 later this year, I think we’ll be alright.

But just to be fair:

***CRAPPY TV SHOW SPOILER ALERT***

So why the rage as the screen faded to black? Well, because the last shot was of Amber walking down a country road. Alive. The show ended without the viewer knowing what happened to Amber. Four episodes of a drama series about a girl going missing that in the end revealed… Well, nothing much of anything at all, it turned out.

That was bad enough.

That was annoying.

But what BROUGHT ON THE RED RAGE was the response of the team behind the show to our disappointment over this.

They said,* “It’s like real life, and in real life you don’t always find out what happened to the person who went missing.”

They said, “If you were really paying attention, there were plenty of clues.”

(Implying that you hadn’t paid attention at all and were too stoopid to put it altogether. You dumbarse!)

And to pour acid into the wound they’d already poured salt into, they said, “She’s just gone and no, no character you met along the way had anything at all to do with it.”

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

OH HOW MY BLOOD BOILS WITH SUPERFLUOUS CAPITAL LETTERS.

When a reader sits down with a book or a viewer settles onto the sofa, they’re expecting a story. Stories have beginnings, middles and ends and the end of a story is also the resolution of it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is tied up nicely in a bow and every mystery carefully explained away, but it does mean that the reader or viewer is left feeling satisfied. They feel there is a point to the story, a good reason for its existence.

That’s why the whole “but that’s what it’s like in real life” line doesn’t wash, because this wasn’t real life. It was a TV show. And TV shows get resolved.

(And also, if I wanted real life, I would’ve watched a documentary. Or looked out the window.)

I heard they also said that it wasn’t so much about the crime itself, but the effect the crime had on the family, neighborhood, etc. See Broadchurch for an excellent example of this. But what happened at the end of Broadchurch? Oh yeah, WE FOUND OUT WHAT HAPPENED AND WHO DID IT.

But that’s just the manslaughter charge in this crime against story. The murder one is the revelation that no one the viewer was introduced to in the fictional universe was responsible for the murder and/or disappearance of Amber.

Or to put it another way: cheating.

If the writer of a story that involves a crime (or other mystery) decides from the outset that they’re not going to reveal or explain to the reader/viewer what happened by its end, they are doing the writing equivalent of dictating to an assistant as they sunbathe on a beach in Bahamas while the rest of us live in a dark stone cell and scratch our story onto the walls with a pen knife.

By candlelight.

In a draught.

With no reveal/explanation, there are no rules. If there’s no rules, you don’t have to play by them. You don’t have to induce a migraine tying your plot up in knots and drawing graphs and using six different colors of Post-It notes to map out every last twist and turn. You can do whatever you like because it doesn’t all have to make sense at the end. You can fill your story with intense moments of mystery and end every chapter with a crazy cliffhanger and it all doesn’t matter because — woo-hoo! — you’re free to make this crap up as you go along. You can do whatever you like because you haven’t committed to doing anything in particular except stringing us all along. Let’s throw in a unicorn and a ghostly apparition and a car chase and then – POOF! – deus ex machina, THE END.

I should’ve known that Amber had a plot problem because of the shambles that was Episode 2.

Amber had a non-linear narrative that kept jumping around in time as it followed different people through her disappearance and the subsequent search for her. In episode 1, we were shown Amber coming out of the city centre on the Luas (tram) carrying a shopping bag. Got that? Right. In episode 2, we focused on a very shady character who was already in prison for another crime and, in flashbacks, we saw him looking very suspicious as he sat in a parked car and watched Amber walk by on the day she went missing. But anyone with two brain cells would’ve instantly been able to deduce that Mr Suspicious had nothing to do with Amber’s disappearance, because when she walked past his car she wasn’t carrying a shopping bag. Therefore she hadn’t been into the city yet. And since we knew from Episode 1 that she stayed alive long enough to get back on the tram and come out of the city with her shopping bag, we knew this guy didn’t kill or take her.

(I’m not even going to talk about the episode where Amber’s father SAVED AMERICAN BACKPACKERS FROM HUMAN TRAFFICKERS IN EASTERN EUROPE BY WATCHING PORN AND HAVING A PROSTITUTE OVER FOR DINNER. No, really. That was actually the “plot” of the final episode.)

If convicted for this first degree murder of what a story is supposed to be, the prosecution should seek the death penalty in this case because while leaving us hanging is bad enough, the creators admitted that (a) they know what happened (um yeah, oh-kay…) and that (b) NO ONE WE MET IN THE SHOW WAS RESPONSIBLE.

(Remembering that they told us the show was filled with clues, had we bothered to pay attention.)

Are you [BLEEP] kidding me with this?

That breaks the cardinal rule of crime and thrillers, and breaking this rule shows such a blatant disrespect for the reader/viewer that I’d need to start taking blood pressure medication if I thought about it too much. It’s just not playing fair if you don’t give the reader/viewer a chance to figure it out for themselves. Now I read crime novels and thrillers all the time, and I never figure it out. I like it that way. (I was once friends with a girl who would start every book by turning to the last chapter to appraise the ending. Only if she liked it would she go back to the start and read the book. We’re not friends anymore. Coincidence?) But when what really happened is revealed, I go ‘Oh, right! I see it now.’ I realize the clues were there all along. Readers who are cleverer than me may go ‘I KNEW it!’, but despite our different reactions we’re both feeling satisfied, we’re both feeling like the time we sunk into the book or show wasn’t wasted.

But if the person who killed/disappeared Amber WASN’T EVEN IN THE BLOODY SHOW, well, we don’t have much of a chance of figuring it out, now do we?

And of course, it also means that no one involved in writing the show had to figure it out either. Again: cheating.

It’s not that stories that aren’t neatly tied up can’t be satisfying. See Tana French’s In The Woods or series 2 of The Bridge for more on this. But they worked because even though not every plot strand was tied up in a bow, something was. And that something made sense. It also involved CHARACTERS WE’D ACTUALLY BEEN INTRODUCED TO.

I was venting my rage on Twitter the night of finale when someone suggested we send the writers a copy of Robert McKee’s Story. I suggested that that might be a bit advanced for them. Perhaps an episode of Murder She Wrote instead?

You know something? I realize now that this blog post may not have a point. I just really needed to vent about how stoopid that bloody show was. But you know what? Maybe it’s not supposed to have a point, because that’s, like, real life. Things don’t get all neatly tied up in real life, dontcha know.

[UNICORNS DESCEND]

[A T-REX BURSTS OUT OF THE BUSHES]

[THE POWER GOES OUT]

The End.

Now, how was that for you?

Amber is apparently going to air on BBC Four sometime this year and after that it’ll infect Netflix. It’s too late for me but run, save yourselves!

What show or book had an ending that gave you the RED RAGE? Why was it so rage-inducing? Did you watch Amber? Do you think we can have some of our TV license fee back from RTE? Let me know in the comments below…

This would have driven me nuts. And “It’s just not playing fair if you don’t give the reader/viewer a chance to figure it out for themselves” – this is why I don’t like the original Sherlock Holmes stories, since when you get to the end reveal, you find out that Holmes has solved the case with aide lot of clues that were never communicated to the reader. At least in this case that is internally consistent with the structure of the stories (Watson is the narrator, so if he doesn’t notice the clues, we don’t know about them either), but it still drove me nuts every time. (Sorry for the rant, this happens to be one of my pet TV/literary peeves!)

I think a lot of people whose viewing of this kind of program was confined to Amber and other RTE dramas were probably impressed, but when you’d spent week, months or even years of life watching the best of US, UK and European crime/drama TV, you could tell the creative highlight of the series was the opening credit sequence.

When I first started watching Amber, I had just finished watching the series Thirteen. It was very interesting and did have a great ending. I have enjoyed these types of shows, such as Broad Church, and the Killing. I didn’t think Amber was that great at first, then I did get into it after awhile. I have seen many shows with no ending to the story line. I get enraged at first and always say “Now that was stupid” I will say that it does make you think after the show has ended. You can interpret it yourself, and make your own ending! I myself think that she is still alive and her father will eventually find her. Now with the line no one you met had anything to do with it. We never met the guy in the white van! Hmmmmm

This post totally does have a point: If you are an up and coming writer, don’t look at writing books and general advice about writing and dismissively say “I’m too talented to follow base formula and expected conventions, I’m going to do something completely different and expect everyone to appreciate my creative genius and originality”. It usually doesn’t work and is best left to seasoned writers, and even then only works if the true base formula is actually followed, but in an unconventional way.

One of my favorite authors, Tad Williams, wrote an awesome fantasy trilogy called Memory, Sorrow & Thorn. LOVED IT!
So when his 4 book sci-fi story Otherland came out, I dove right in.
5 years and 4 monstrous volumes later…

**Spoiler **

the plot behind the entire series is…a giant mutated BRAIN in outer space. A space Brain…the genius boy that runs their whole virtual reality world has atrophied away to nothing and only his giant brain lives on to control.

I actually read Otherland (was the first one called Otherland??) in secondary school and I’d never read fantasy so it was like the most dense tome I’d ever attempted, and I’m so glad I gave up after one! 😀

Oh, Oscar and Lucinda. I threw the book at the wall and ranted about it for weeks after I finished it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book. Brilliant, in fact. It gets you to care about two difficult and not entirely likeable characters. Guides you through their story and WHAMMO! Betrayal! Aaaargh.
And don’t get me started on some of the series endings of Dr Who.

I shall remember to avoid Amber like the plague. Thanks for the heads up.

Enjoyed your post.
I think I must be one of the few people who enjoyed this show and the ending. I know why we want everything wrapped up in conclusions and I agree it’s needed especially for novels and films and tv series but this tv mini-series ending was different. I felt like the parents of the daughter who was missing. Everyone searches for clues, but at the end of the day, some people stay missing and that’s why I appreciated the ending of this show because it’s every parents worst nightmare – to never know. I know it’s not a popular opinion, Catherine forgive me, but as a viewer I got it. I think it’s like Marmite, which I love…

But there was no satisfaction…? And there’s a way to make the reader/viewer feel as the character does, to get the horror of not knowing, but there needs to be something resembling a plot in the lead up to. Tana French’s book does that spectacularly (In the Woods.) There’s a present day storyline, which is resolved, and a past storyline, which is not, and the feeling of not knowing the past story’s resolution is shared with the main character, who won’t ever get answers either. Combined with its other plot problems, Amber comes across as nothing more than amateur hour to me, which is a shame because clearly there was a lot of creative talent in the acting, etc. and I’d love to see more of this home-grown programming on TV. But this just didn’t cut the mustard…

(Also I would say that if they came out afterwards and said, ‘Oh this guy killed her’ and you could go back and look for the clues yourself, I would have forgiven all. But they admitted no one in the show killed her. This is just absolutely unforgivable. That’s not telling a story. That’s stringing scenes together and hoping for the best.)

I haven’t seen it as I am in Sydney, Australia! but won’t bother now if it comes my way. I love your vent. Similar to one’s I have about other similar TV. programmes and movies.
The point for me is Satisfaction. if we can’t get no satisfaction, to quote an old but great song, there is no point! It’s just a waste of our time. Thanks for warning us all.

Thanks for the warning. I had a similar reaction when I read the mist in the mirror by Susan Hill. A short book, not a bad story but so much was left unexplained at the end, including the mist in the mirror!

I had this rage in Season Three of ’24’. The viewer was all worried about whether Kyle Singer* will infect America or will Jack Bauer get there in time (*teenage blond kid that was supposed to have a killer virus). Turns out Kyle never had the virus, and the package he was carrying didn’t contain the virus and Kyle was… absolutely nothing to do with any virus and had no role whatsoever in the plot. I’d spent five episodes trying to figure out how it would resolve. Do these people think I’m MADE of time? Am I a walking grandfather clock to them? Or a Time Lord? Or… something else made of time? I’m a working mother who also writes books, and when I give a show/book/play my time I demand a reward in the form of clever writing.

I don’t mind a red herring – that’s clever and really hard to do. But this wasn’t a red herring it was just like: ‘we can’t resolve this plot line so we’re just going to say it was never a plot line after all and look, look over there – something shiny!’. CHEATS! If I did that with one of my thrillers everyone would just say ‘Ah, self-published you know, she can’t even resolve her own plot lines.’.

Thanks for saving me from the Amber mist. That’s four more hours I can spend sticking brightly coloured flags in my current draft saying “Resolve this!”, “Give this character a plot role or ditch them.” etc.

Ha! Loved reading this. I love good comedy ranting and your account of the show ended in a much better way than the show itself. Nice work. I won’t watch it when it surfaces on BBC4 because cop-out endings annoy the out of me and I couldn’t agree more that fictional stories, unlike real life, really do have a responsibility to have a point, even if they’re not neatly tied up with a bow.

To be fair though, when watching TV my need for resolution is so intense that I find it nearly impossible to stick with anything that doesn’t offer closure in the first episode. So many of my favourites are hospital-based shows (like House, Grey’s and the much-missed ER) because I get INSTANT resolution of incidental storylines to keep me going through the endlessly drawn-out main plotlines. I can stick with a book indefinitely but I want my TV to be over quickly. I wonder why that is. Anyone else get TV ADD?

I figured they had run out of money or someone died or whatever. Why on earth would you not end the story properly? So now we know, thanks to you, that the problem was with the writers. Darn it, I really wanted/needed an ending. Guess I’ll make up my own 😉

I loved this, chuckling all the way through! And you have saved us from four hours sitting and many hours puzzling. Closing in on the end of this season of Game of Cards, woops House of Cards (US version), and feel certain it will have similarly disappointing conclusion (as in no conclusion). Thank you! (and loved the images also)

That’s not cleverness. That’s poor writing.
At the end of Battlestar Galactica, (SPOILER), they made a hamfisted attempt to do a ‘moral of the story’ connection to the modern world, leaving with ‘this could happen again!’
It did not work, but was not as frustrating as Amber seems to have been.

You said it perfectly! I would’ve been unhappy about that too. In fact, I (my book’s main character) posted about something similar on my blog last week, but it involved a book. It feels like you wasted your time watching the show or reading the book.

I was really dissatisfied with Amber too, but for slightly different reasons. I would have been ok for the unresolved ending, but for the fact that there was no payoff at all during the 4 hours because overall, it just wasn’t good enough. I threw my eyes up to heaven so often watching it, I ended up with a nervous tic which now gets me refused coffee in certain establishments.

Like you say, anyone who’s become used to watching such sharp Scandinavian stuff or the new cinematic US and UK TV for instance is used to better. Amber didn’t work for me because the quality just wasn’t there, in production values or the writing. The acting was really poor in places (1 main character in particular who shall remain nameless) and sometimes it felt like the director/writer was RAMMING A POINT DOWN OUR THROATS ‘CAUSE WE JUST WOULDN’T GET IT ON OUR OWN, LIKE.

If I’m going to sit through 4 hours of resolution-free postmodernish drama, it should be good enough to keep me entertained before we get to the end. It didn’t, and I wasn’t!

The part that really had me rolling my eyes was Amber’s phone. These volunteers are working in a “Find Amber” office. One opens an envelope, a phone falls out and he just drops it on the desk to be covered by a pile of envelopes. Then some idiot woman finds it and shoves it in a drawer (umm… who in “real life” would ever do that, you know, if this story is supposed to be so true to life and all that) and then somehow her grandchild (or whoever he was) has it in his stroller (so… not only did she make no attempt to find out whose phone it was – like look at the pictures or the contacts – but she then steals it and gives it to a toddler as a toy) and he very conveniently drops it down a drain. Because every toddler I know has the dexterity to do that. So irritating!

Ooh, do I hate stories that don’t plant the necessary foreshadowing to make you go, “Oh, I get it,” at the end. (Dare I mention that the uber-popular “Frozen” is like this?) And thanks for the warning on “Amber.:

Haha that’s hilarious but I can relate after watching Enemy. Fantastic acting and intriguing story. The ending.. I can’t even explain how angry I was – it made no sense, it’s like it stopped half way through. I couldn’t sleep from anger. But I’d watch it again just for Jake Gylenhaal.

Great post! I feel your pain. I STILL have outbreaks of capital letters about the ending of Lost, which crashed and burned a full four years ago. I gave that program SIX years of my life, and the writers had NO respect for…

Yes, and I forgive the 3rd series because they didn’t know how many more they were going to have to do so they were like Stretch Armstrong-ing the plot while they waited to find out. But after that… They set themselves up for failure. Too many intriguing questions raised. There was never going to be enough satisfying answers.

Thank you for this post – just what a good rant should be – totally partisan, informative and hilarious! Trying to be too clever at an audience’s expense and style over content are not two qualities I admire in storytelling. I hope they consider themselves suitably chastised and will do better next time.

Very excellent point, Catherine!! Do not ruin the climax. For example, it shouldn’t turn out to be all a dream and that none of it ever happened in the first place, and the protagonist woke up and told someone about it. What a downer. We’ve stuck with you for all of this time; we want a conflict ending that is satisfying!

I wish I had read this 4 weeks ago. Having battled with Amber on BBC4 and all the steps backwards and forwards I was hoping for some suggestion of what might have happened to her character, but I ended up feeling that the writers did not care about her and they had little sympathy for the rest of the cast as well

I gather that the Writer’s main defence was that in this is supposed to reflect real life where there’s often no answers.

Ok the problem with that is that they didn’t structure the story like a real disappearing kid incident , they structured it like a conventional mystery story with no conclusion. In real life there aren’t apparent hint, clues and mysteries old men in prison who seem to know something. In real people vanish and then there’s just nothing, no hope of an answer ever.

If they had just focused on the family coping exclusively and not focused at all on the investigation and all the red herrings I’d probably still feel annoyed but I’d have to concede that this thing had at least been successful at what it set out to do. as it is the show is just conclusionless whodunit pretentiously pretending to be something deeper

I totally agree. It could have been a character study in what the disappearance of a child does to a family OR a conventional mystery but it was never going to work trying to be the first while acting like the second. I felt like they kept us hanging on episode after episode with the clues, suspicions, mysteries, etc. and then – click your fingers – oh, we’re a character study now, see-ya! Drove me cuckoo. Is STILL driving me cuckoo, obviously! ;-D

This US citizen thanks you from the bottom of her raccoon eyes. I watched the first episode of Amber via Netflix late one night. For some reason, I felt I couldn’t continue watching unless I knew the outcome. (I never do this.) So, I googled “is Amber dead or alive” and came across your blog. I’ve never laughed so hard and was shocked to learn the outcome (or lack thereof) of this series. I share Europe’s disappointment with the writers. Boo!!! How dare they? I will find something else to watch. Thank you for the warning!

Now, I am going to see if you have written anything about the casting choices for “50 Shades of Gray.” : )

Alas, I havent. I *love* Jamie Dornan (have you watched the amazing The Fall? It’s on Netflix) but while he’s eerily believable as a serial killer, freshly shaven he’s more angelic altar boy than corporate overlord/dom…

The clue to what happened to Amber is in the last scene, she’s walking on a country lane, the road dips, we no longer see her, storm clouds overhead, remember how hard it rained when the con is in his car. Another clue: her bag is found in water, I think she stayed on the lane, the storm brought loads of rain, flooded the road she was swept away, along with her bag, and her body is carried far enough along that it hasn’t been found.

Oh my gosh! I just watched this show on Netflix. Was hoping for something similar to Broadchurch, boy was I wrong. In true Netflix style I marathoned my way through it, each new episode hoping to get somewhere. I did NOT like all the jumping around. I can’t remember which day they flashed up before each scene and I was getting very confused as to what happened then. And then I got to the end of the 4th episode… WTF?!? That has to be the stupidest, most pointless show I have ever wasted my time on. If I wanted an unresolved ending I would read about an actual missing persons online. What was the point??? So of course, I immediately went on the internet and googled “Amber crappy ending” and came across your blog post which I couldn’t agree more with! My question is… how the heck did it get 3 stars on Netflix??? Who on earth rated this pathetic excuse for a show more than 1 star?

I appal some of my friends because I am, at times, a “last page reader”. And I have been known to watch the end of some movies and TV shows after sampling the first half hour. Simple. I don’t want to waste my time reading or watching something that won’t give me any kind of a resolution to a story ending. I had a hunch “Amber” was going to be one of those. I found it on Netflix recently. And after watching the first episode, I went to episode 4 and fast forwarded to the last ten minutes. Then I went in search of someone’s view of it to see if was as useless as it appeared to be and found your blog. Thank you for saving me the torment of having to write my own rant.
Big fan of The Killing and The Bridge. Didn’t need to check out their endings, because I knew they weren’t playing around, although I was pretty upset (and felt manipulated by the writers) when someone I was connected to died unnecessarily in The Bridge … naming no names. As a writer myself, I know it is my job, (because I am a last page reader), above all else to offer a resolution in every one of my novels. May not be a happy resolution, but I aim for satisfying or inevitable. Thanks again!

Hi. I actually work for the channel that broadcasted this in Australia a couple of years back, apparently ahead of everyone else – 13th Street. All we show are murder mysteries and I was particularly enthralled by Amber at the time and loved making the promos. After the final ep’s credits we actually decided ourselves to add some text over the final shot stating that the unresolved ending was meant to reflect the uncertainty of a missing persons case.
Was it maddening not having a resolution? Yes, of course but since this was a missing person mystery and not a murder mystery I was intrigued by the ending. Having seen many this is still one I think about to this day due entirely to its ambiguity. I’d suggest it’s why you’re all thinking about it too. I wouldn’t want any other show to follow in its footsteps and prefer to at least have some idea of what really happened, but this once I think it was a good way to go. It drives you crazy but so does never finding out what happened to a real lost loved one.

If you liked this until the ending and want something else with an excellent twist please do yourselves a favour and hunt down spoorloos. A great movie from the 80s

I live in the US and watched this in 2014 or maybe early 2015 via Acorn TV. I saw it on Amazon streaming today and said to my husband, “I know I’ve seen this before, but I can’t for the life of me remember what happened to the girl.” So, it’s a lazy Sunday. We grabbed some breakfast & espresso drinks and just binged watched it. You know what’s worse than watching Amber and realizing that you won’t get any closure? Watching it friggin’ twice! I asked my husband to remind me of today if a year or two from now I see Amber available on Netflix and can’t recall what happened to the girl.

i had a lot of fun to read you
i just discovered your blog , i really like the first glace at it
– you the sentense about coffee and book…-
i watched Amber
I didn’t read the whole article (i’m french, and sometime a little tired in the evening after watching the last ep all with irish accent and witouth subtitle: crazy me!)
and i do understand the reaction that you have about it.
But you know, in my village, in south of france, there are this real story: there was this guy, who own commerce, he was my opticien. His daughter was a friend of mine. She worked with him. He had a wife, 4 childreen, and he was going grand father.
A nice guy.
Then about 10 years ago, he just disapear. And nobody knows what happened, nobody. And in the middle of our town, we got his commerce, they didn’t change the name,
And we always have a memory when we pass through the place that we don’t know nothing. They just find his car in the middle of the campaign, there were dog searching him, there were military, an helicopter…
there were announce and still, nothing
some people think he had enought with the family and he gone, withouth nothing as money or clothes…
me i think he is dead
and when i saw amber, it was that , that i really like: the diseapearance of somebody, and there are no answer. It really remind me of my past optician ( his name Denis Plouhinec)
i wanted to share that experience, there
in my tired english
thank for reading me
i hope to read more article from your blog
Caroline

I recently discovered this show on Amazon prime here in the U.S. I understand the frustration. I felt that way with the BBC One series The Missing. Similar ending, is the boy dead or possibly alive. I like those type of endings if done well (John Carpenter’s The Thing gave an annoying, yet exciting open ending). Creatively, it is possible that the creators wanted to give viewers a sense of what it feels like to have a missing child. The constant struggle to have hope they are alive, yet experience says otherwise. It was a well acted and well made series and I enjoyed how it wasn’t an idealized version of Irish people or another IRA story.

Having spent my career dealing with the aftermath of crime, it’s safe to say that no fiction can show outsiders what it’s like to live this kind of nightmare. A story simply can’t convey the disruption and heartache endured by the loved ones, regardless of how good the writing is. If that’s the reason for the no resolution finale, it’s a poor one!

Many people watch (or read) fiction to make a break from reality. People in the US watched the Natalee Holloway horror play out in real time. If I wanted to revisit that, I would have found a documentary about her or one the countless other people who go missing . Their survivors never will be the same.

I caught the four episodes of Amber on Amazon Prime. Unfortunately it’s not unusual to run into shows on Acorn or Prime that are incomplete . It wasn’t until I read your blog that I realized that Amber was supposed to end like that.

I don’t ask for a morality play – but is it trendy these days to create stories without a point at all? The 2015 French series the Disappearance at first appeared incomplete on Acorn, but it was rather obvious where it would lead. The anguish of the family members was palpable as the police cleared one suspect after another. That’s how these cases REALLY go. The investigation is a LONG, hard slog as close family are forced to endure every up and down. No television drama can convey that.

Darn, watched it before I read this.
Have you watched Parfum yes, that’s how it’s spelled. It’s on Amazon I believe. I thought it was good and yes, there was a conclusion!
Thanks for your article! I enjoyed reading it!
RM from USA

Well, I guess the safest comment is that TV is not real life. But….I did pick up some clues in #4. Dad was out with his camera shooting the Asian fellow with the dog at the end. She was seen on a street with the red/fuchsia headed fella, never a true character on the show. Girlfriend was loosey-goosey from the get-go hiding stuff she did not wish her Mother to know about. She disappeared getting off a bus. Then in final scenes the bus appears again, and when it leaves the screen, she is no longer seen; to all reading this, I ask, what scenes left you with clues? Am I ‘raging’ – No. disappointed in a fishy ending – Yes.